C'est un piège!
A 1999 French & English Language Found Footage Horror Film Directed by Reymond Costa and Stars Alexander Delace and Brando Nordane as two doomed urban explorers going by "Sling" and "Bizzy" and Emanuel A. Gulliomole as the worker. Optical and Creature Effects where created practically and digitally by the Woods brothers. The film also features Bryce Londi as an unnamed female the duo glimpse momentarily in the darkness of the catacombs. It is still often credited as one of the scariest films ever made and continues to appear on numerous top ten horror film lists. Astonishingly there are not two separate dubs of one film for the two various releases. The majority of the films dialog was reshot in English after its success in France and Canada with a few minor edits to fix continuity and technical errors present in the original. Costa had previously directed the romantic comedy "Maybe Mid Autumn" in 1990 and raunchy stoner comedy "New Herbialand" in 1992 which were both met with audience approval but panned by critics and die hard fans of his first 3 gritty dystopian sci-fi films in "The Lasersmith Trilogy" which had reached peak popularity at this time after having been adapted into the smash hit video game series of the same name. He had previously produced the vampire Classic The Manifest and the ancient world Epic "True Colossus" Costa particularly cites a review of New Herbialand in the Empire City Era for pulling him back into the world of Body Horror and Special FX one last time: "...Costa showed a tremendous amount of promise in his early career with "Carnassier" & "Crimes de Charognard" but that was when he had balls and was obviously very fresh and hungry, it seems the time for Costa to freeze the blood of cinema goers with his visual storytelling, bizarre visuals, disturbing yet fascinating flavor of sci fi body horror and creepy blue birds has past and the long, dreary age of schlock and pandering garbage has begun. It's disappointing but after 5 of these asinine little films and his failure to produce this tunnel film he keeps threatening us with since he started, I would not hold my breathe." Costa stated in a 2002 Interview: "That was a challenge to me. Such arrogance, and I think I did my due in smacking his down after that. During the premiere, I watch him critch and cover his eyes with everyone else, I grinned like a vulture at him as he walked out, hands behind my head, I tell you "he cackles* I wish I could have lit a cigar to blow smoke in his face, but, y'know, modern theaters and such. I had already written and filmed a rough version of the film many years ago, but we didn't have the budget and the insects where just reanimated bodies but the idea was that they had played host to there parasitic insects. I like the scorpion monster much more. It's nice not to have them in my nightmares anymore, but oh Dog Damn did that little sun of a bitch booil my blood. It was a challenge to me, I did not want to make horror forever, friendo, I want to always do something new, like this ballet movie we are filming now, pure bliss, and this too will rattle people, but in a different way." Plot (Spoilers) Two Unnamed Urban explorers only going by the handles Sling and Dizzy meet for the first time after responding to a ciphered email challenging the pair to team up and reach an unexplored point of the Paris Catacombs,Tempted by the promise of Ten Million Dollars. While Initially dubious BOTH received calls from the their respective banks that a timed deposit for 5 Millions has already been deposited to their accounts but a memo states that the journey MUST be completed or the pot goes away. Though both are experienced with exploring this type of environment it soon becomes apparent that they are going into places they should not be. A slow burn of about 1 hour builds tension as the pair ignores red flag after red flag, casually chatting about what each will do with their winnings. As they venture into the darkness, Sling mentions that he is switching batteries and they have been traveling for 6 hours. After an indeterminate amount of time, filming resumes for about 3 minutes they are suddenly shocked to see what appears to be a nude woman with a severe chest wound and a blindfold running at them down a long ruined corridor with the remains of a wooden door. Before she reaches them, they can see a massive pulsating object which seems to have been shoved Slingctly into her chest, then the walls of the tunnel they are start to buckle and she screams, ducking down a separate corridor leading down an unseen pathway. Caught off guard by this first collapse, the two manage to wriggle into a crack in the stone floor but this ends up sealing them in to a narrow crawl space with no visible end. While Bizzy takes off his headlight to adjust the bulb the camera catches a glimpse of what appears to be frantic claw marks on the inside of the door they just dove through to escape the collapse. Frantic writing scrawled in blood reads "C'est un piège!/ It's a Trap". The camera sees the warning, the lads do not and almost immediately plunge into an area far BELOW the paris catacombs where the actual horrors await them. From this point forward the films major marketing misdirect takes effect, 'C'est un piège!' was originally marketed as a straightforward, b-horror movie with a predictable "Wig-Wearing-Witch-Beastie" as Director Costa called the particular genre trope monster an interview, implying that these types of monsters where becoming a bit too common at the time for his liking. They fall a great distance into a truly hellish prehistoric environment unknown to the surface world, below any explored tunnel or cave.The situation immediately becomes more Sling as Bizzy sustained a severe laceration from an ancient upturned sword. The remains of Armored corpses reflect in the alien light and fog. A loud roar can be heard in the distance and a terrible high pitched sheik of unknown origin can be heard much closer. Panicking, Sling ripps the sword from between Bizzy ribs believing it to have been stabbed past his from the side. Bizzy scream as his rib cracks and the shrieking sound appears MUCH closer. Bizzy is Gushing blood and is going to die if they don't find some way to the surface. Bizzy begs Sling not to leave him and Sling reminds him that they both need to make it out alive to provide a thumbprint to the bank. Sling tears off a sleeve and attempts desperately to clog the bleeding but Bizzy cries out in terror and pushes Sling out of the way moments before being attacked by a 16 foot long, arthropod with razor sharp pincers and a mouth full of helling mandibles, covered in a thick black and orange carapace. Sheik Identified, Slings flight response kicks in. The camera does not spare any details from the creature and the attack happens FEET away from the lens, the creature is shown in horrific detail and even tries to eat part of the head mounted camera Busy is wearing before attacking his face and giving Bizzy a gruesome sendoff, eating his face off in front of the lens of his head mounted camera before Sling grabs the device and flees crying and howling in panic into the slime coated tunnels. As the film progresses Sling encounters more and more of the evolutionary nightmares the deep underworld has cooked up. He is attacked by glowing mosquito like insects that inject something INTO his leg rather than extracting Blood. He begins coughing up blood and losing teeth from breathing in the dense colored fumes and he encounters then flees from more of the scorpion monsters that killed Bizzy, He escapes through a rusted grate but the creature eat several of his finger and toes off his left foot and severely damage his face with what appears to be a stabbing appendage that was sticking out of the female they encountered back in the tunnels, though unseen he is unable to speak for the remaining 9 minutes of the film and emote mostly through a frenzy of cries and panicked screams and agonized howls. The American edit shows a blurry split second cut that some suggest is Sling fumbling with his own severed bottom jaw. Now trapped in near absolute darkness with the cameras battery counting down "5 minutes remaining" he encounters a MUCH larger and aggressive armored crustacean which snares him and breaks or severs his left arm and manages to destroy the headlamp but not the camera. To his horror about 50 of the mosquito like insects that injected him previously explode from his calf muscle, having completed their gruesome lifecycle, crippling him further. The film concludes with the last flickers of light showing Sling approaching a bizarre sealed door which looks completely out of place. it is locked and the last shot of the film shows Sling beating his stump and partial fist on the rune covered metal of the massive gate as the crustacean monstrosity closes in for the kill. His death is shown in gruesome detail as the creature begins to devour him alive piece by piece. As the camera counts down from 30 Seconds, the creature notices the camera and disturbingly seems to comment to it in an ancient and unsettling speech before pushing the strange door open and tossing the camera out into a cave resembling one they had past much earlier. the lens cracks fully and the film cuts to darkness and credits. Halfway through the credits the camera turns back on, showing the face of a city worker who has reactivated the camera somehow, The shot reveals the door behind him is Wide opened and several silhouetted monsters approaching in the dark that he can not see but the camera can, he suddenly screams as the woman from earlier in the tunnels charges at him, the cloth has fallen from her eyes revealing her eyes have been sliced out by one of the crustaceans as she cries out the films title one last time before the film cuts to black one more time, the remaining credits roll in silence. Category:Meta-Content